Blending and Harvests

I love harvest time! Our neighbors are getting older and don't like to mess with putting away fruit from their trees anymore so sometimes we get to pick their fig and peach trees. Here we got two five gallon buckets full of peaches that were falling off of the tree. Now they need to be processed/set out to finish ripening.

With all of the fresh produce in this season I was excited when my aunt gave me a beautiful hot pink blender to make smoothies with some of it.

 I knew the first recipe I wanted to try was the raw chocolate pudding: this recipe called for a banana, avocado, cinnamon, raw cacao powder, and (almond) milk blended then chilled. It was yummy!

We are looking forward to the rest of this season!

Produce in Abu Dhabi

Every country introduces me to more new fruits and vegetables. There are several new things here in Abu Dhabi, but sometimes I can't find their names... so I took some pictures:

 (not the best with the phone, but that's the easiest way to get it.)

The only thing I recognize here, are the squashes on the top left... and I'm not super familiar with those.

I've never heard of a Pomelo before, or seen this type of fruit.

These look like particularly strange cucumbers to me.

These remind me of a large acorn or squattier-shaped eggplant.

Something else that is new to me here is the way you have to ring up the produce in its own special section. (Pictured above.) You get all of the produce you want and bag it up, then you take it to a special counter where it is weighed and labeled and ready for check out. This makes for a speedier checkout process as everything is ready to just be swiped through and paid for... but I didn't know this the first time I went and someone had to take my produce back and get it labeled for me. Oops!

Do you know what any of these things are or how to use them?